Climate Crises, Ruined Islands, and British Metamodernism

ABSTRACTThis article contends that popular acceptance of Anthropogenic climate change in early 2000s Britain coincided with cultural efforts to redefine the historical present via transhistorical phenomena through the concretization of deep time. This article therefore situates itself in the historical juncture between the IPCC’s first report (1990) and its fourth (2007) to argue that the climatological, financial and geopolitical crises that coalesced in the 1990s prompted a shift that changed the tenor of British climate fictions published in the 2000s. To address the supranational reach of the climate crisis, British authors used metamodernist means to map the historical ruination of remote islands onto speculative futures extrapolated from the climate reports of the IPCC – thereby conjuring the climatological transformation of Earth into an Earth-like planet and the propulsion of humans toward future obsolescence. Ultimately, this article attends to the ecocritical significance of Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Self’s The Book of Dave (2006) and Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) to suggest that these metamodernist climate fictions transpose the failures of submerged pasts onto near-futures drawn from present precarity to undermine the present as unique, the future as determined and the past as inaccessible and of little use to the present or future. AcknowledgmentsI would like to thank Dr. Christopher Douglas, Dr. Nicholas Bradley, and Dr Helga Thorson for their mentorship. I would like to express my gratitude to visual artist Terry Marner for introducing me to metamodernism and to acknowledge metamodernist scholar Dr. Alison Gibbons for her kind words of encouragement. I would also like to recognize the editorial team at Critique for their guidance. Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Michael Lukas, Dr. Marla Buchanan, June Violet and Caspar Finnegan.Disclosure StatementNo financial interest, benefit, nor potential conflict is reported by the author.Notes1. Santayana, “Reason in Common Sense” 82.2. Self, Junk Mail 109.3. A term coined by reporter Dan Bloom in 2007 that gained more widespread currency in the decade that followed.4. This article refers to the Indigenous names given to each island (Hiort, Rēkohu and Rapa Nui) rather than to their colonial designations (St. Kilda, Chatham and Easter Island) in recognition of the Indigenous communities that populated these sites prior to colonial occupation.5. In Plato’s Symposium (ca. 385–70 B.C.), the term metaxy (μεταξύ) denotes an oscillating movement among, between, and beyond two poles (202d13-e1).6. DeLillo 33–40.7. See for example, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2001) and Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress (2004).8. Donne, “XVII Meditation” (1624).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Ian H. Stewart Graduate Fellowship, and Hugh Campbell and Marion Alice Small Fund for Scottish Studies.Notes on contributorsEmily ArvayEmily Arvay completed her PhD at the University of Victoria in 2019 with her thesis “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism.” Since then, she has worked as a writing center tutor and academic coach at the center for Academic Communication at the University of Victoria. She also works as a managing editor for The Arbutus Review—a peer-reviewed academic journal featuring the interdisciplinary scholarship of undergraduate authors.